Dolphins Have Memes, Too

I just heard about this from the BBC: there have been sightings of dolphins off the coast of Australia who are doing what is called "tail-walking" - standing above the water by waving their tales in the water. Tail-walking is not a behavior that wild dolphins display in nature; however, one dolphin from that area did spend some time in a dolphin facility recovering from illness - and, while she wasn't trained to tail-walk, she did see other dolphins doing it. What it looks like is that she took this new behavior with her out into the wild and taught it to the others.

Observers have been trying to understand what triggers the dolphins to do this, but they haven't yet discovered anything. What the article doesn't mention, and I think is probably significant, is the deep sense of play which dolphins have always displayed. It is likely they are doing it as an interesting and fun thing to do - though of course there are more boring possible explanations, such as looking for schools of fish.

But the really interesting thing about this is that it displays what is called "cultural behavior":

"Culture can be defined as all the ways of life including arts, beliefs and institutions of a population that are passed down from generation to generation. Culture has been called "the way of life for an entire society." As such, it includes codes of manners, dress, language, religion, rituals, norms of behavior such as law and morality, and systems of belief as well as the art." [wiki]

Dolphins off the western coast of Australia have been known to teach their young to use sponges to help them gather food, so this kind of dolphin-to-dolphin teaching is not undocumented. But to do something as a group that doesn't inherently gain them better survival actually points to something deeper, a communication and a passing-on of interesting stuff which, like internet memes and social networking in humans, is a cultural phenomenon. Strange and wonderful stuff!

PS. Link:
Another interesting article from New Scientist (of course - I love that magazine!) about animals teaching each other stuff.

Decrepit But Not Abandoned

Walking on Marjan, the high hill-park here in Split, I have walked past this fascinating spot a number of times.



It's rare, in the States, to see glass greenhouses anymore - and rarer still to see one in such a wonderful state of organic funk. I wondered what this was for ages before I went to investigate.


I found that it was the Botanički Vrt, or the Botanical Gardens, a largely futile exercise in signage, as it is crumbling and seems to have very little in the way of exotic plants. There are several greenhouses, of which this is the largest (the others seeming to be a poor storage area for a motorcycle and a bunch of cast-off window-frames). The gardens are tiny and pretty, but this greenhouse held my imagination. Walking around it was an exercise in mysterious snooping.





After I'd been there for awhile a guy came out of one of the buildings to smoke a cigarette. He looked at me curiously, then asked me a question in Croatian. After awhile I realized he had unlocked it for me, so I went inside, to a scene of curiously domestic disintegration and decay.




Proof positive that it's always worth investigating...

A Line Drawn in the Sand

Snapshot: a poor-student January weekend trip with a boyfriend to the Wine Country in Napa and Sonoma Valleys, to do some wine-tasting and try a hot spring (maybe) and just explore. Unfortunately, the wineries were largely closed and the spas were too expensive, and it rained and rained, for three days. There were flood warnings. We fell back on driving, following the Russian River out to the coast and then, eventually, on up to Mendocino. We were aimless, something I miss nowadays.

I was feeling unadventurous with the rain, so when we pulled off the road at the place where the Russian River came out to join the sea, looking out the car window at the grey day and the beach far below, I was uninclined to be friendly towards my partner when he went off down a cliff-trail to the beach below. I stood, fuming, for a little while, and then followed him down with ill-grace.

On the beach, the sounds of the sea calmed me a bit. The air was cold and fresh, and there were small birds running about. The river had formed a blind estuary:

"... “pocket” lagoons... frequently occur at the seaward end of a stream, which has a small drainage basin and thus limited amount of runoff. Where the rainfall is seasonal, the inlet of such a lagoon is open during the rainy season and is closed by wave action and long-shore drift during the dry season. Under natural conditions these lagoons have significant water exchange with the open ocean by seepage through the porous sandy barrier" [link]

The water stood, a great lake of it, bulging beyond a high sand-dune. Odd little heads peeped themselves over the edge of the dune, curious and shy, looking longingly at the sea, where another head poked out of the water: seals, trying to decide whether to make the trek over the dune to the safety of the sea.

I did what I often do at the beach, idly drawing in the sand with my heel. My friend had gone off to see if there was enough driftwood to build a little house, and looked as if he were having little success. I looked at the sand where I was scratching, and noticed something: a slow trickling of water, continuous and steady, coming out of the sand. The river, higher than the beach, was seeping through the immense sand-bank into the sea.

I walked to the top of the dune, eyeing it critically. It seemed to me that the water in the estuary was not far below the top of the dune. I decided to play around and let some trickle of the water out so that my friend and I could make dams and channels, which he was very fond of. So I dragged my heel from the water's edge over the sand-bar to the beach, making a thin scritch of a line. No way was this going to get any water. It was too far, too deep. Still, it was something to do, and sometimes I get funny about things like this. I wanted to try, anyway.

I went back and drew my heel over the line again, and again, and after four times the water's edge seemed to follow my foot a little. One last drag, and the trickle began. I had broken through!

My partner, interested in what I was doing, came over and began to help me form and shape the channel. We drew bits off to the side, made dams, played pooh sticks. Unlike most beach waterworks, the water didn't sink into the sand, but went where we bade it, forming rivulets and pools and filling dams in a most satisfactory way.

By this time the little stream had spread to be about a meter across, and a number of other people out on the beach had come over to help, digging things deeper and making better channels and dams. We had a great string of little ponds which the water leapt and bustled willingly through. Children sailed sticks down it; adult men dug furiously with sticks and hands. Everyone was sandy and wet; people shouted to one another to accomplish tasks; we all worked together to make it bigger, better, more amazing.

There came a moment when we all looked up and realized, however, that the water was now five or six meters across, and almost a meter deep in some places - and we realized that if we were to be where our cars were we would have to cross now or walk several miles back to the closest bridge. Fathers picked their kids up and hurried across the thick currents; women picked up bags and shoes and ran, splashing. We stood on opposite banks and waved at each other or stared upstream, awed.

Somehow, we were unable to leave: it was as if there was something that had not happened yet. The water grew deeper and more swift, and it became gradually clear that there was a fallen tree trunk straining above us at the sand-bank; it stirred and pushed, the water rilling around it, and we stood back, silent now, waiting, while the water pushed above and ate away below. It seemed impossible, looking at the raging torrent, deeper than a man's height now, that it had been caused by me dragging my heel across the sand.

The people on the far bank were smaller now, a good eight or ten meters away: a long "ahh" went up above the roar of the water, and the tree, moving slowly at first, began to slide along toward the sea. First it snagged, turning and rolling, and then something let go - and the tree began a stately course downstream, the brown water leaping and tugging at it. By the middle of the beach it was moving like a freight train, unstoppable, and leapt when it hit the salt water in a great arc: then, bobbing and whirling it went on, past the breaking waves and into the vast grey-blueness of the sea.

We all smiled at one another and shook our heads, trailing slowly off to our cars, turning to wave at our distant brethren. There was nothing left to stay for.
__________________________________________

"The tide rises, the tide falls,
The twilight darkens, the curlew calls;
Along the sea-sands damp and brown
The traveler hastens toward the town,
And the tide rises, the tide falls.
Darkness settles on roofs and walls,
But the sea, the sea in darkness calls;
The little waves, with their soft, white hands
Efface the footprints in the sands,
And the tide rises, the tide falls.
The morning breaks; the steeds in their stalls
Stamp and neigh, as the hostler calls;
The day returns, but nevermore
Returns the traveler to the shore.
And the tide rises, the tide falls."

- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
__________________________________________

A year after this story, the Sonoma County Water Agency began breaching the Russian River estuary whenever it looks as if it might be causing problems upstream. However, they seem to take much more drastic measures:

"The size of the pilot channel varies depending on the height of the sandbar to be breached, the tide level, and the water surface level in the Estuary. A typical channel would be approximately 30 m long, 8 m wide, and 2 m deep (100 feet long, 25 feet wide, and 6 feet deep). The amount of sand moved can range from less than 100 cubic yards to approximately 1,000 cubic yards. The Agency contacts State Parks lifeguards within 24 hours prior to breaching activities to minimize potential hazards to beach visitors. Signs and barriers are also posted for 24 hours prior to and after breaching events to warn beach visitors of the hazards of the breaching area."



I'm sure it all starts, though, with a line drawn in the sand.

Gecko Feet: Natural Marvel

Thanks to the National Science Foundation for the picture

Traveling in Southeast Asia, geckos on the ceiling were a common occurrence. They would stake out territory, chasing each other away with vehemently waving tails, as if they did not notice they were in the middle of a rough, lumpy, peeling ceiling, hanging upside-down.

I would lay in my bed and watch them fight, wondering why one of them did not fall on my face. As it turns out, no one else knew either until relatively recently. Discussion of their toes as if they were suction cups were fairly common among us plebs, and even the scientific community assumed there was some capillary action at work, keeping them stuck by the moisture in the surface they were walking on. But in the past few years they have actually tested gecko feet and found that they work even in super-dry environments.

If you look at a gecko's foot, they have these weird flaps on them that look suspiciously like long, narrow suction cups. They spread when they walk in a soft, mushy way that is utterly fascinating, and if you've ever held a gecko you will understanding my saying that their amazing toes are almost velvety (in a rubbery sort of way) to the touch. And, if you did agree, you would be right. The bottoms of a gecko's feet are, in fact covered with millions of tiny foot-hairs on each toe, called setae, each about as long as the width of two human hairs (about 100 millionths of a meter). Each seta, in turn, is divided at the end into approximately a thousand tiny spatulae (yes, you guessed why they are called that), which are about 200 billlionths of a meter wide, which is smaller than the wavelength of visible light.

It seems the geckos' toes create so much surface area in this way, with such tiny endings, that they are able to make use of Van der Waal's force - a weak attractive force which is present between molecules - to stick themselves to the ceiling.

Geckos' feet are naturally ultrahydrophobic - in this case, hydrophobic referring to a molecule which is repelled by water - and have been tested by sticking them to a GaAs semiconductor, which is also hydrophobic. The only thing known to make two hydrophobic surfaces adhere in air is Van der Waal's force, so the old question of capillary action has been disproved.

Universität des Saarlandes

Kellar Autumn, probably the leading researcher on gecko's feet, says they are strong, as well:

"We took a single gecko foot hair (seta) and made the first direct measurement of its adhesive function...We used a microscopic force sensor designed by Tom Kenny at Stanford to measure the tiny forces of adhesion of the gecko seta.

We discovered that the seta is 10 times more adhesive than predicted from prior measurement on whole animals. The adhesive is so strong that a single seta can lift the weight of an ant 200 µN = 20 mg. A million setae could lift the weight of a child (20kg, 45lbs). A million setae could easily fit onto the area of a dime [$0.10 coin]. The combined attraction of a billion spatulae is a thousand times more than a gecko needs to hang from the ceiling. Maximum potential force of 2,000,000 setae on 4 feet of a gecko = 2,000,000 x 200 micronewton = 400 newton = 40788 grams force, or about 90 lbs! This is 600 times greater sticking power than friction alone can account for...

Our discovery explains how it is that any gecko can hold up its entire body weight with only a single finger. If the adhesive is so strong, how do they get their feet off? ...We found that if we increased the angle the seta makes to the surface, it just pops off" [source]

This is helped, of course, by the fact that geckos' toes are backwards-jointed, meaning that when they flex their toes they curl upward rather than downward, allowing them to peel their toes from the surface to which they are stuck.

Gecko feet are self- cleaning as well. Because the same force applies between dirt particles and the surfaces the geckos walk on, the dirt prefers to stick to the relatively large and attractive surface rather than the tiny spatulae on the gecko's feet. So when a gecko's feet get dirty, all they have to do is walk a few steps and they are clean again.

"Geckos' adhesive microstructure requires minimal attachment force, leaves no residue, is directional, detaches without measurable forces, is self-cleaning, and works underwater, in a vacuum, and on nearly every surface material and profile."

Perfect, in other words, for synthesis.

Synthetic setae have been in the works for several years now, with ideas like micro-robots that could climb walls or be sent to places like Mars, where self-cleaning sticky feet might be greatly useful; or setae-covered clothing, which would allow people to literally crawl about on the walls and ceiling. And most adhesives don't work in the vaccuum of space, while Van der Waal's forces work everywhere. But keratin, the hydrophobic protein that gecko's setae are made of, is hard to reproduce: hydrophobic substances, such as silicone and polyester, are harder to mold into setae-like shapes than other substances - and the hydrophobic qualities are key to the reproduction of the setae's effect, or water molecules stick to it as well, making it soggy and eventually destroying its sticking power.


But in June of last year, researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the University of Akron came up with a flexible "gecko tape" that they claim has four times the sticking power of the real thing. This tape is made by covering polymer surfaces with carbon nanotube hairs, which use a Van der Waal's effect to adhere. The tape is designed to be as easily-removed as a gecko's foot, so the tape does not get damaged and can be used over and over. They even have pictures, which show that on a microscopic scale they are admittedly much less attractive than the original.

And now, "at Stanford University have created a robot which uses synthetic setae in order to scale even extremely smooth vertical surfaces just as a gecko would." [wiki] So here we are.

I am curious, with all the hype around this technology, to see if it is indeed self-cleaning, as the original idea went. If it is, then we have once again successfully learned from nature, and created a whole new era of fun things to play around with. But if not, then it's not much different than any other tape, because it'll get dirty and stop working.

And part of me is really excited that we, too, could crawl around like geckos someday. Rock-climbing will take on a whole new meaning; skyscraper-climbing could become a new sport; or hanging onto the bottoms of airplanes - the extreme sport possibilities are endless. My travels in Southeast Asia would have been much different if I had been able to put on my special gloves and socks and join the geckos on the ceiling ("break it up, you guys!").

But part of me will regret the loss of one more part of the unknown. In the not-too-distant future, you can imagine the Southeast Asian traveler exclaiming to his or her travel partner, "Hey, look at that lizard! It looks just like you when you're in your ceiling suit!"


Somehow it loses some of the quiet magic of lying there, and watching them, and wondering.


Links:
- Paper on the gecko tape

- How geckos' feet stay clean

- Geckel, a super-sticky adhesive combining the setae concept with the "glue" used by mussels

- The Global Gecko Association, dedicated to gecko enthusiasts world-wide.

- Pictures of a Western Banded Gecko cleaning his eye, which has no moveable lids (this genus has no setae).

Rosamond Purcell: Goddess of Wunderkammern

Peter the Great's collection of pulled teeth, probably the most influential picture, for me, ever.

Just found this slide show/article, courtesy of Slate, about my absolutely favorite artist of all time, Rosamond Purcell, a few of whose books I mention in the Christmas list, but who is also the extraordinary contributor to Finders, Keepers: Eight Collectors, and the amazing Illuminations: a Bestiary, both incredible books.


Check it out - it's worth reading and looking at! And if you want to put the above two books on your list, well, I won't stop you.


Link

Also, a marvelous review by John Crowley of Purcell's work.

To Err Is Human, to Forgive...Human

In September, two researchers from Penn State University published about their new way to capture genetic material from extinct animals. I heard about it at the beginning of that month, when the information was released prior to the publication of a paper in Science, and have been talking about it with a friend of mine for two months now.

The thing that's unusual about this new method is that previously, with DNA samples (both nuclear and mitochondrial) from muscle and bone, there was so much cell degradation and genetic interference from bacteria and so on that it was difficult and time-consuming to find a clean enough sample to be able to get a good chunk of sequencing out of it. Sifting through the remains of mammoths and other extinct animals was so complicated and expensive that it would sometimes take six years for a single study of a single bit of mammoth. Think of it: you get this little chunk of animal, and then you have to figure out which of it is that animal and which of it is bacteria, viruses, the drool from the thing that killed and ate it, the bugs and things that broke it down after death, or whatever.

Not only that, but previously the process of saving mitochondrial DNA had been extremely difficult and fragmented, mitochondria being the driver of a number of cellular activities such as cell signaling (which includes communication between an embryo and the uterus), cellular differentiation, and control of a cell's cycles and growth.


Now, however, Stephan C. Schuster and Webb Miller have - nearly by accident - discovered a much faster, cleaner way: they take the DNA from hair.

For a long time it was thought that hair was a poor way to collect DNA because they had to gather from the few cells still clinging to the roots of the hair. The rest of the hair appeared to be dead material. But Mr. Schuster and Mr. Miller found that actually, the core of a hair is, essentially DNA; and that the material surrounding it on the outside of the hair (the keratin) is actually like a natural plastic, in effect laminating that DNA so that it remains quite pure. All they had to do was to wash the hairs very thoroughly, to remove any environmental contaminants, and then essentially crack open the "plastic" protection, and they had an instant cache of genome-building materials - plus a "remarkably enriched [source of] mitochondrial DNA, the special type of DNA frequently used to measure the genetic diversity of a population."

Not only is the DNA cleaner, but this means much, much shorter turnaround times: "In contrast [to previous methods], Miller said, 'Once I get the data from the genome sequencer, it takes only five minutes to assemble the entire mitochondrial genome.' The discovery... demonstrates that hair clippings can give researchers enormous power and efficiency for divining the genetic makeup of ancient species, " says the press release article from Penn State. The pair's work with hairs as old as 50,000 years has already set off a complete genome sequencing for mammoths. There is some discussion in the scientific community of the possibility of cloning a mammoth, which could be gestated by a modern elephant.


This brings up a lot of ideas for my friend and I. If it becomes this easy to sequence a genome for an extinct animal, and insert it into a modern animal's womb, then what's to stop scientists and entrepeneurs from re-creating extinct animals - the dodo, the passenger pigeon - and creating a wild-animal park a la Jurassic park, full of previously extinct animals? What's to stop us from simply fixing our previous mistakes, and putting dodos back on the island where we so gleefully slaughtered them, or re-introducing the many Amazon species which have been lost?

All those museum specimens which have some tiny portion of hair or feathers left - think of how much richness and variety of DNA is now available for us to sequence! We can be gods on our own earth.

Which brings me to the next point, which my obnoxious mind immediately jumped to, beyond the fun and joy my friend was imagining. What is to keep us from saying to ourselves, much as we do about dropping a dish, or about not buying a car with low gas mileage: oh, dear, we've made that species extinct again. Oops! Well, we'll just sequence it and start over. No one will mind...except, well, darn, the funding ran out. We'll do it later. In the meantime, look over there -

It smacks of the Godfather: "Bless me Father, for I have sinned", followed by the inevitable "Say (or compile) three gene sequences and don't forget to say your prayers," and the feeling that we have done our penances so we are all right to go out and kill again.


The thing that is so impressive to my friend is the idea that within his lifetime, he may get to see a wooly mammoth walking around. That right there makes him nearly want to weep, because it's like magic. It's like imaginary things coming to life, like all the things he thought would be the future when he was a kid, and was disappointed by (where's our jet-packs, dammit?). It's all the stuff we've lost, coming back to us - a universe of new exploration, new knowledge. It's a true Wonder, come to us in this time, when we are alive. And he's right; it is. It is really like a miracle. I have to say, the thing, for me, that would make me weep, would be a whole flock of dodos, peacefully minding their own business somewhere. That would be something to see.

But with every marvel comes a warning: the fairies are magic, but they can be dangerous too. Don't trust them too much, or you may fall asleep and wake to find everything you love has gone.

Image: Andy Goldsworthy

Synesthesia: the Flavor of Music, the Color of Touch

In the late 19th century, synesthesia, that strange and magical condition where the sense are intertwined, was the subject of much research all over Europe and America. The fact that some unspecified number of people experienced sensory crossover was fascinating, but attempting to design tests that would satisfactorily prove its existence, not to mention why it happened, was difficult. With the advent of behaviorism in the 1930s, a field which disallowed any usefulness in internal experience, interest in synesthesia waned, and it became a forgotten science. Then in the 1980s, with the cognitive revolution, science began once again to pay attention to internal states. Lo! Synesthesia slowly crept back into fashion.

We all know stereotypical synesthesia from movies and TV: the idiot savant who sees colors when he or she hears music, or perhaps the brilliant cryptographer whose different letters and/or numbers in different colors move about to solve a mystery. Because I first heard about it as a child, I had a bunch of really wild ideas about the condition, based on a description of a condition where the so-called sufferers' "senses were mixed up". I had imagined people who could taste sound, or see smells; people who felt color or pattern on their skin, or perhaps people who smelled their way through life, instead of looking.

Some of the above are actually documented, but others are (at the moment anyway) merely fancies of mine. When I started reading around in preparation of this post, though, I found a fascinating array of different perceptual issues under the same heading. In fact, as I started reading, I began to realize that I was synesthetic myself.

Drawing of the neural circuitry of a rodent hippocampus

Strangely, I had often thought how cool it would be to be synesthetic, but had assumed, like narcolepsy, that it was relatively rare and rather unmistakable. When someone I knew said she was synesthetic I figured it was a bid for attention, a way of making herself more interesting. I knew that I had some perceptual quirks, but simply put it down to being highly imaginative, or perhaps merely the leftovers of some childhood way of teaching myself things.

For example, when I was first learning my alphabet, I saw the letters as having distinct personalities. I didn't seem to have any choice about what their personalities were, but they were clearly there. Putting together words was much like putting together little conversation groups at a party: the dynamics were different if you forgot one, or put it between the wrong two letters (thus my spelling was always excellent). To this day, I still see the letters as having these same personalities (with some odd effects due to fonts - some fonts I don't like because they warp the poor letters' personalities in uncomfortable ways); however, now I gloss over it. Like so many things when we grow up, we begin to take things for granted, like the motions of driving or the walk to the mailbox. We say to ourselves, there's the oak tree, or oh, it's sunny today, but we say it in shorthand. We don't really look at the oak tree, and we certainly don't stop long enough to actually look at the way the sun is hitting the grass.

So I have been living with these little characters [sic] all my life, without really noticing them much. But if you asked me about them I could tell you all about how the "a" and the "y" don't really like each other - but that might be because the "y" is kind of stuck up, and the "a" is really very down-to-earth. And so on.

It turns out this is called Ordinal Linguistic Personification, and can be identified as true synesthesia by a test they use for many synesthetic expressions, ie. a test where the quality of the picture shown is in contrast with the automatically perceived quality as seen by the synesthete. So, for example, if the synesthete sees a "b" as female, then making a male figure out of "b"s will slow their recognition time.


This form of synesthesia often goes hand-in-hand with Grapheme-Color Synesthesia, which is the most common form: seeing letters and numbers as colored. I don't personally have this form of it, but like many forms of the condition it can be seen as actually colored, or can simply have a strong, automatic color association in the mind of the perceiver. Which makes it difficult to put a finger on, except that tests have proven that people can be confused because of the strength of their perceptions. As one person says, of her grapheme-color perceptions, "I thought this was caused by me over-thinking things." Apparently this is actually quite common, for people (like me) to simply believe they are being imaginative, or making up systems to help themselves (as I did), in school or elsewhere.

A picture of one person's number-form synesthesia, ie. the mental mapping of numbers, from Francis Galton's study, The Visions of Sane Persons

One of my favorite forms is lexical-gustatory synesthesia, where people experience phonemes as different tastes in their mouth. Can you imagine? It would be like the fairy tale of the two sisters who have jewels, frogs, etc. falling from their mouths, except all mixed together, depending on what you were saying. It might be enough to turn one into a seriously laconic individual.

What about people who "see" music, or sounds? This is another common form of synesthesia, to have colors associated with specific tones, so that listening to music becomes a more intense and complex experience. I always thought that the little thing I did, where I "imagined" the music as colored ribbons which twined above, and slightly to the left, of my vision, was a sort of game I played with myself, because like a page on a computer desktop I could minimize it if needed. But it was always there, even if I wasn't specifically thinking about it. Apparently, this is not an unusual type of synesthesia for musicians to have.

In fact, it seems to be fairly common for synesthetes to be creative people. "Some studies have suggested that synesthetes are unusually sensitive to external stimuli. Other possible associated cognitive traits include left-right confusion, difficulties with math, and difficulties with writing." [wiki]

Carol Steen's painting of a synesthetic experience of acupuncture

I find this interesting, because I have all of those traits (except writing), and am terrible with numerals. Conceptually, I'm all over math, but when I have to deal with the visual symbols I get lost. On thinking about it, I realize that seeing letters as interesting social groups actually helps me to spell, but it doesn't help with math. The personalities of the numbers confuse me when I'm trying to work with their numeric values.

This human ability to make up stories, to find systems so as to make sense of a chaotic universe, is inherent in everyone, reaching right down to some of our most basic ways of interacting with the world. Like face recognition, storytelling is one of the deep ways we recognize things and organize our world. But synesthesia lies even deeper, right down to the molecular levels of the brain. It is beginning to emerge that the characteristic is X-chromosome-linked, and there is some evidence that some of its effect (though not all) is associated with the hippocampus, a part of the limbic system of the brain which is crucial for spatial memory and navigation, and which is affected by many kinds of altered states of consciousness. LSD, for example, is said to induce synesthesia sometimes, and its effect is connected to the hippocampus. Interestingly, the limbic system is also where many emotional associations are made.

There is some researchers who believe that neonatal brains have minimal sensory differentiation, ie, that we "learn" to differentiate between the five senses; and therefore synesthetes may be people for whom these differentiations have not developed into such specifically walled-off areas. A common conception is that when sensory stimulation comes in from one area, such as the ears, there is a sort of cross-stimulation that takes place where neurons in the sight area of the cerebral cortex are activated as well, causing a visual response.

As Mr Cytowic (see below) says, "Mechanistic explanations have been plentiful throughout synesthesia's history. The notion of crossed wires turns up repeatedly. As early as 1704, Sir Isaac Newton struggled to devise mathematical formulae to equate the vibration of sound waves to a corresponding wavelength of light. Goethe noted color correspondences in his 1810 work, Zur Farbenlehre. The nineteenth century saw an alchemical zeal in the search for universal correspondences and a presumed algorithm for translating one sense into another. This mechanistic approach was consistent with the then-common view of a clockwork universe based on Newton's uniform laws of motion."

There are other aspects to it, which haven't been explored so much, which don't fit in so well with the scientific community's penchant for following single ideas down to their roots. For example, synesthetes generally have very good memory, recalling things such as conversations, directions, and verbal instructions with surprising accuracy. They are very often amazingly good at spatial location "such as the precise location of kitchen utensils, furniture arrangements and floor plans, books on shelves, or text blocks in a specific book. Perhaps related to this observation is a tendency to prefer order, neatness, symmetry, and balance. Work cannot commence until the desk is arranged just so, or everything in the kitchen is put away in its proper place. Synesthetes perform in the superior range of the Wechsler Memory Scale." [Cytowik again]


It is interesting to note how the term "synesthesia" has been used for many years in the world of literature, art and music, not as an experiential condition but as a metaphoric edifice, a sort of symbolic way of expressing things. The metaphors (that storytelling urge, again) which pervade our senses, the smell of green cut grass or the clarity of wetness, are a cultural construct, a direct connection to the arts. Despite this, there are many famous creative synesthetes, who have made their mark, directly or indirectly, on our lives. Vasily Kandinski, a well-known synesthete himself, is quoted many times in scientific literature. His desire to bring the immediacy of his perception to audiences, his exhortation to "stop thinking!" has endeared him to those people fascinated by the wild individuality of the condition, the repercussive echos that it brings to the study of the brain. For synesthesia is, at heart, that most ineffible of things: a creative experience of the world, immediate and unquantifiable, having an everlasting impact on our culture through its artists. It brings to mind what Kandinski said, back in 1910:

"Lend your ears to music, open your eyes to painting, and . . . stop thinking! Just ask yourself whether the work has enabled you to 'walk about' into a hitherto unknown world. If the answer is yes, what more do you want?"





Some links:
Richard E. Cytowic's very interesting and absorbing review of the subject from 1995, very worth taking a look at for a more detailed and sensory description.

His book, The Man Who Tasted Shapes, can be found on Amazon.

Wired Magazine's 2005 take on the phenomenon.

(Thanks to Violinist.com for the image at the top of the post)

The Song of the Passenger Pigeon

A mystery. My father told me a story about my grandmother, who grew up on a tiny island in the south end of Lake Erie: he said once, when she was very small, she was out in the fields with her father. She remembered this particularly because she wasn't often allowed out with him; it was a big deal.

So they were standing there, and the sky darkened, filled with birds. The birds stretched for as far as the eye could see and literally brought darkness into the day - for minutes upon minutes. She remembered asking her father what they were, and her father replying, "Passenger Pigeons."

This story fascinated me throughout my youth, because my own father then would explain to me that the last passenger pigeon, named Martha, died alone at the Cincinnati Zoo when my grandmother was seventeen.* The idea that the birds could go from that kind of crazy-populous to the lone bird dying while zookeepers stood and watched helplessly, just blew my mind. And something about my grandmother's story had a dreamlike quality: the two figures standing, holding hands, out in the field, while with a noise like a whirring, chattering storm, thousands and thousands of birds pass by.

It appealed to me, as it appealed to me that my grandmother grew up in a time without radios or cars, and then watched as first cars, then radios, then television and space travel, and finally, personal computers came to be. That plain old lady never ceased to stun me; in her I saw the most amazing kind of mortality, reflected as it was in the vast experience of age, and all the people left behind. What a life! And - how adaptable people are!


And yet, one of the reasons that the passenger pigeons did become extinct was because people didn't adapt, they didn't learn when to stop. They didn't look, or listen, or care. Here is a description by John James Audobon of a roosting-place, where the hunters waited to slaughter these graceful, gentle, slightly comical-looking birds:

"Many trees two feet in diameter, I observed, were broken off at no great distance from the ground; and the branches of many of the largest and tallest had given way, as if the forest had been swept by a tornado. Every thing proved to me that the number of birds resorting to this part of the forest must be immense beyond conception. As the period of their arrival approached, their foes anxiously prepared to receive them. Some were furnished with iron-pots containing sulfur, others with torches of pine-knots, many with poles, and the rest with guns. The sun was lost to our view, yet not a Pigeon had arrived. Every thing was ready, and all eyes were gazing on the clear sky, which appeared in glimpses amidst the tall trees. Suddenly there burst forth a general cry of "Here they come!" The noise which they made, though yet distant, reminded me of a hard gale at sea, passing through the rigging of a close-reefed vessel. As the birds arrived and passed over me, I felt a current of air that surprised me. Thousands were soon knocked down by the pole-men. The birds continued to pour in. The fires were lighted, and a magnificent, as well as wonderful and almost terrifying, sight presented itself. The Pigeons, arriving by thousands, alighted everywhere, one above another, until solid masses were formed on the branches all round. Here and there the perches gave way under the weight with a crash, and, falling to the ground, destroyed hundreds of the birds beneath, forcing down the dense groups with which every stick was loaded. It was a scene of uproar and confusion. I found it quite useless to speak, or even to shout to those persons who were nearest to me. Even the reports of the guns were seldom heard, and I was made aware of the firing only by seeing the shooters reloading.


"...The Pigeons were constantly coming, and it was past midnight before I perceived a decrease in the number of those that arrived. The uproar continued the whole night...Towards the approach of day, the noise in some measure subsided: long before objects were distinguishable, the Pigeons began to move off in a direction quite different from that in which they had arrived the evening before, and at sunrise all that were able to fly had disappeared. The howling of the wolves now reached our ears, and the foxes, lynxes, cougars, bears, raccoons, opossums and pole-cats were seen sneaking off, whilst eagles and hawks of different species, accompanied by a crowd of vultures, came to supplant them, and enjoy their share of the spoil.
It was then that the authors of all this devastation began their entry amongst the dead, the dying, and the mangled. The Pigeons were picked up and piled in heaps, until each had as many as he could possibly dispose of, when [hundreds of] hogs were let loose to feed on the remainder."

The birds were so abundant that another man describes this:

"In 1805 I saw schooners loaded in bulk with Pigeons caught up the Hudson river, coming in to the wharf at New York, when the birds sold for a cent a piece. I knew a man in Pennsylvania, who caught and killed upwards of 500 dozens in a clap-net in one day, sweeping sometimes twenty dozens or more at a single haul."

If one man in a day can catch and kill more than 6,000 birds, it is no longer hunting; it is a kind of inflation, mass ornicide. The Victorian Taxidermy site, to whom I owe many thanks for their fascinating and incredibly informative page on passenger pigeons, discusses some of the causes for the birds' extinction. Since they were known to double - or even quadruple - their numbers in a single season, it would take some doing to overcome that quantity of population. Not unreasonably, it's believed that a combination of factors caused their demise. For one thing, they needed vast quantities of old-growth forest to roost and eat in, which by 1900 was rapidly dwindling (imagine how much food they ate! That's a whole nother question). Another factor was the relentlessness of the slaughter. As the VT site says, "The pigeons were subjected to shooting on the widest and most devastating scale. They were never free from persecution at any time of the year. They were hunted in spring at the beginning of nesting which was most disastrous, where the fat squabs were always considered a delicacy, later young birds in summer were much sought after, and finally adults were taken at all times. The pigeon had no peace."


Lastly, and most curiously, there is a theory that the pigeons simply didn't do well in decreased numbers. They were used to a living environment where they didn't need to be cautious; their numerousness made them indestructible. Not only were the birds in lesser numbers just as easy to catch as they'd been in larger numbers, but in psychological terms, they didn't function well. It's possible they felt vulnerable, and simply gave up breeding: they were stressed, and their breeding-places were as unsafe as everywhere else.

Oddly, looking at the history and the statistics, I've found my grandmother couldn't have seen passenger pigeons flying over in that number. The last recorded kill of wild passenger pigeons was when she was two years old. They hadn't flown that thickly since before she was born.

So where did the story come from? Did a large flock of birds fly over and prompt her father to tell her about seeing passenger pigeons when he was young, causing some kind of false memory? Did her father incorrectly identify some other kind of numerous bird? Or did she in fact see the very last flight of the birds? One of the last recorded collections of birds was reported in Ohio, at the right time and not far from her island, though it seems very unlikely they would be as thick as she describes. But I will never know, for she died thirteen years ago at the age of ninety-seven, and I can't ask her. She was always a nature-lover, communing with birds and shore. My elder daughter bears her name.

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*(We have incredibly long generations in my family, so don't be horrified; I promise I didn't have mine at age 60 or something. Having one's children at a venerable age seems to have been fashionable with my ancestors long before it became commonly popular. My grandfather was born in 1876, no less; just think of it as genetic seven-league boots.)

The Allure of Hot Glass

A glass store in Rome, demonstrating the infallible beauty of glass. It's easy to love it, but be careful of its shiny attraction: it can get vulgar sometimes...

If you've ever been to a glassblowing workshop and watched the glassblowers doing their stuff, or seen a demonstration at a historical museum, you'll know what I mean when I say that blowing glass is a dance, requiring a specific and delicate choreography, often involving many people working together.*

Most people don't think of glass as sensual, but it is - when it's hot. Glass is really a magical medium. Its melting point is at around 2400 degrees Farenheit (1300 Celsius), so touching it is out of the question. The incredible, lush pliability of glass when it is hot can only be felt through the end of a blowpipe, never with your hands. Wet wooden tools, wads of wet newspaper, and steel implements become your fingers and hands when you are interacting with hot glass; the love affair is conducted at a distance. This takes quite a lot of time: to learn to feel the quality of the material, judge when it is ripe for movement, know when you can shape and pluck, push and pull. It must be kept constantly, constantly moving, for gravity exerts an inevitable pull, tempting the hot and drooping glass to pool on the floor, and your job is to dance the rolling dance, turning and turning so the glass doesn't follow gravity's will. The sensuality of it begins to hit you as you get better at the dance; the sweatiness, the manipulation of softness, and the titillation of that desire to touch and necessary distance is inescapable. It is truly hot stuff.

Looking into the Glory Hole

A good glassblower can feel the gradual slowing of movement as the glass goes from near-liquid to sluggish, a warm taffy consistency, to an eventual hardening which signals that the end is near. If you are not finished at this point, you are in danger of your work cracking, breaking, or popping off the punty (long steel pole) and shattering on the floor, so you must keep heating it, using your sense of distance-touch and the glow of the glass to tell you when it is hot enough to work, but not so hot that you lose all the detail and shape of what you have done so far.

And it is hot! Working with the furnaces, dipping the blowpipe into the crucible of molten glass or reheating in the glory hole (special reheating furnace), you feel that you are suffering a form of localized sunburn, a crystalization of your sweat. Your skin radiates; you don't notice you're sweating because all of you is at the end of that pipe, that pole, moving the glistening stuff around.

My friend Pamina Traylor, a masterful glassblower and sculptor, at work with a reheating torch: more localized than the glory hole.

Curiously, it is this need for heat that was the undoing of much of the forests of Europe. As Venetians took their glass skills and traveled to other places (which they weren't supposed to do - but since when does that stop people?), glass workshops were set up all over the continent and the British Isles. In 17th century England, James the First finally banned charcoal burning because of fears that the forests would be decimated - not because he loved trees, but because they were fast approaching a place where there would be nothing to build ships out of for the navy. Losing the charcoal-burners, who transformed trees into hot-burning fuel, meant that the glass industry, one of the most fuel-hungry industries around, had to recalibrate their furnaces and their glass "recipes" in order to convert to coal.

This led to several improvements in the glass. First of all, the coal produced a purer, high temperature product. Secondly, and oddly, Admiral Sir Robert Mansell (the naval man who advised the King to ban charcoal burning) retired from the navy and started his own glassworks. He experimented with adding iron and magnesium to the mix in an effort to make colored glass, but instead came up with a much stonger type of glass.

(One offshoot of this was that the English then were able to start fermenting wines in the bottle, since the glass was now strong enough to withstand the pressure. The French didn't start being able to make champagne with a second fermentation until the mid-1800s: their wood-fire blown bottles weren't strong enough.)

A typical Dale Chihuly piece, about 14 feet high, made with over a thousand pieces

Historically, glassblowing was always an activity either Guild-centered or exclusively industrial. Then in the late 1950's Harvey Littleton, an American ceramicist who grew up in the glass town of Corning, New York, began experimenting with glassblowing in a studio, with the help of Dominick Labino, a glass scientist who designed a simple furnace. By the early 1960's he had begun teaching others what he had learned, and the modern studio glass movement had begun. The Littleton style of blowing, however, was a sort of bootstrap affair, doing nearly everything oneself; which is a bit like insisting on building your house with your own two hands - you can do it, but why?

By the late 1960s studio glass artists had begun turning their faces to Venice, where artisan (rather than industrial) glass was still being blown by highly-skilled people. A conversation was begun between Venetian and American glass artists which is still going on today.Dale Chihuly himself, a student of Littleton and one of the best-known glass designers in the world these days, was and is a big proponent of the team style of blowing, creating work that would be absolutely nowhere without many hands to help. In fact, Chihuly takes this idea a bit further, allowing highly skilled blowers to do the hot-glass dance for him entirely, since he has lost an eye and doesn't have the requisite depth perception.

To my mind, one of the most wonderful, the most magical parts of the blowing process, aside from the sheer addictiveness of the act itself, is the way you get to come back the next day and see the things which were once liquid transformed into cool, crystalline hardness, through some almost incomprehensible alchemy. The glass has gone from being naturally hot, orange, and in motion (cold equalling danger), to cold and immovable, brittle and clear.

The nature of glass is finicky; it must be cooled slowly, or it will shatter. The thicker and larger the piece, the longer it must take to cool, or stresses within the structure of the glass (yes, it is indeed a type of silica, with a couple of other things in there) will be too much for the object, and it will give way, sometimes years later. This process is called annealing, and it is done in a sort of hot oven called an annealer, where glassblowers put their work when it is finished. In a modern studio, annealers are programmed to slowly ramp down in temperature until it is safe for the pieces inside to be in the outside air.

If you don't anneal the glass then you are producing a walking time-bomb: I knew someone who had had a paperweight for ten years, and then one sunny day it simply went off, exploding and spraying shards of glass all over his living room. Evidently it hadn't been annealed long enough for its size. Luckily, he wasn't home when it happened. And when I was blowing glass there were these things we made, terribly dangerous I realize now, called Prince Rupert's Drops:

"A kind of glass drop with a long tail, made by dropping melted glass into water. It is remarkable for bursting into fragments when the surface is scratched or the tail broken; -- so called from Prince Rupert, nephew of Charles I., by whom they were first brought to England." -Webster 1913

You can see one of these in the movie of Oscar and Lucinda, and there is a lovely bit in the book, though I can't find my copy to quote it. They are the ultimate in tightly-wound imperviousness, like some people: you can hit the leading end, the round end, with a hammer and nothing will happen; the hammer bounces off in this weird, almost disturbing way. But break the delicate tail, and the whole thing turns to powder in your hand. The internal stresses caused by instantaneous cooling balance the incredible surface tension, which makes the round part unbreakable. But the tail is a sort of long extension of the stresses, so that when it goes, the whole thing goes - with a sort of "phack!" sound.

I heard once that the large lenses mirrors they once used in observatory telescopes, which are often some fifteen feet across, had to be annealed for three to five years, they were so thick and large - or they would crack later and waste all the work, the casting and sanding and polishing, of making them. You can see why there were so few large telescopes in the ancient world: large lenses would be hard to produce, as the technology for annealing was much less accurate before the Industrial Revolution.

Glassblowing, that is, the insertion of a bubble into molten glass by means of a long tube, was begun in the first century BC in Roman Syria, and spread very quickly throughout the Roman world. Previously, everyone had been working on the Egyptian model of glass-making, which had been in use since around 1500 BC: glass was heated and wound around and around a core of mud or a small sand-bag at the end of a long pole. The effect, though colorful, was never large, and often faulty - not guaranteed leak-proof. As Wikipedia says, "this advancement transformed the material's usefulness from a time-consuming process...into a mass-producible material which could be quickly inflated into large, transparent, and leak-proof vessels."

Egyptian glass work

Glass is especially exceptional because it is difficult to classify as either a liquid or a solid. Unlike most solids it has no specific phase-transition, that is the specific moment when the physical properties change clearly from one phase (liquid) to another (solid). The transition from liquid to elastic solid to inelastic solid is a continuum; it has many of the properties of a supercooled liquid, but at room temperature. However, unlike a supercooled liquid, it doesn't move or behave like a liquid. There is an old story that glass continues to flow downward over time, which is why old windowpanes are thicker at the bottom, but this turns out to be untrue, sadly (I always liked the idea that my windows were actually a kind of slow liquid). The truth is likely that, because old ways of making pane glass had to do with pouring molten glass over a surface, the "poured spot" in the middle tended to be thicker. When it was cut up into pane-sized pieces, glaziers would simply put the thick side down, so it would be more stable. [wiki]

Neon jellyfish by Eric Ehlenberger

Another cool thing about glass is neon, or other gas-light tubes. Traditionally, "neon" signs are made by torchwork, i.e. bending glass tubes with the help of a torch, but more and more, people are creating beautiful works using various gasses and hot glass pieces. The trick is to evacuate the glass and provide an electrode at each end, so that the current has to pass through the gas from one electrode to the other, thus lighting it up. These devices, in the form of the Geissler tube, were first developed by a man named (yes, it's true) Heinrich Geissler, who invented them to demonstrate the principles of electrical discharge in 1857.

"They were mass produced from the 1880s as entertainment devices, with various spherical chambers and decorative serpentine paths formed into the glass tube. When the tube was handled (the terminals were insulated) the shape of the plasma changed. Some tubes were very elaborate and complex in shape and would contain chambers within an outer casing. If these were spun at high speed a visual disk of color was seen due to persistence of vision." [wiki]

The interesting thing about the Geissler tube/neon light is that it so quickly became a sort of ghettoized object. Neon, when most people think of it, carries a burden of '50s culture, of cheap hotels and sleazy bars, of flickering signs in Chinatown late at night. Ridley Scott used this shorthand to excellent effect in Blade Runner, but what more creative uses could it be put? What about architecture with vast, delicately-glowing arches of glass? What about Geissler tubes that occurred naturally, growing up inside of crystal structures? Or how about neon that followed the contours of natural objects, such as trees or rocks, in sinuous organic shapes, as part of the Queen's garden? I'd love to see that, somewhere.

Perhaps I'll put it in my next story, unless one of you do. I always wanted to make a hand-blown Geissler tube, probably with argon. Alas, keeping a full-on glassblowing studio is a pretty expensive hobby, and I'm afraid I traveled rather a lot instead. Sadly, too, it isn't like riding a bicycle: if you don't keep blowing, you lose the skill. But I don't ever forget the hot thrill of it...and I'm glad, in the long run, that I had the chance to explore something so innately magical, so surprisingly beautiful, and so, so, marvelously dangerous. It will always be there, in the back of my imagination.

* * * *

*(Editor's note: When I say "glassblowing", I am referring specifically to what is called "hot glass", rather than "flameworking". Flameworking is the small kind of glassblowing, starting with tubes or rods of glass and bending them or melting them to create beautiful objects. By hot glass I mean the working of larger amounts of glass that has been dipped out of a crucible full of molten glass. Both these kinds of glass-working can produce excellent results (or cheesy, depending on where you go, as I said above; beware the cheap ease of its shiny allure); but flameworking tends to be a solitary pursuit, in a small studio, and hot glass requires a large, noisy workspace with plenty of access to fresh air and loads of propane or other gas to run the equipment. It also requires more people to make it work.)

Other links:

Timelapse of Chihuly piece being set up

Great site for learning about glass

Pilchuck Glass School, where you can go to learn to make glass of all kinds: hot glass, flameworking, casting, kiln slumping, stained glass, Ravenna-style mosaics, you name it.

Also, try going to Youtube and typing in "pino signoretto" for a glimpse of a Venetian master glass sculptor at work.

Genius Loci: the Spirits of Place

Three years ago, I moved from a city famous for its shipping docks to a place in the country. Not only "the country," but the valley where I had grown up. I'd lived for years and years in cities all over the world, and coming back here was a wish that had long gone unfulfilled.

Several things struck me on my return. One was the incredible certainty, which took my city-bred children two years to comprehend, that you can walk in any direction in the country. You are not confined to streets and paths. You may, if you wish, simply set off and go cross-country without worrying about the neighbors (mostly). Though you do have to worry about poison oak.

The other thing that struck me is how different this, the place I live now, is from the place I grew up, only two miles down the road. Microclimate? Or different spirits?

When I was in graduate school, in the unnamed industrial city where I ended up living for ten years, I resided in a rather unhealthy part of town for awhile. I had needed to find a place fast, between my arrival from London and the beginning of classes, and I ended up in one of those divided older houses, with young Rottweiler lovers in both the other apartments, all very nice people (but). The front garden had a six-foot-high, black spiked steel fence around it, with a gate that clanged when people walked through it. There was a small, miserable tree outside the gate, which small (and not-so-small) urban boys worked very hard at, trying to get a stick to play with. Sticks, apparently, are de rigor for boys, regardless of their class and upbringing, and these particular boys were starved for lack of them.


As time went on, the tree acquired a lean. Each spring, it put out fewer leaves. Finally one day, I found it lying on the pavement. We had a suitable funeral, and I pondered how much paved places wring the life out of one's soul. I found myself desperate to walk on grass, and I began planting things in the small, unkempt, barren yard inside the barbaric fence. Despite the dog droppings from the other residents' dogs, and the thrash-metal barbecues they liked to hold in the middle of the yard, where people didn't seem able or willing to watch their feet, I did manage to grow a small selection of bushes and vines. I gave some sweetpea seeds to a junkie woman once, and she almost cried, saying she didn't know what to do with them, holding them like they might break or get lost.

Needless to say, this affected my studies. I found myself reading about gardens, every kind of gardens; and eventually, inevitably, I came across books about the grand English gardeners - Capability Brown, William Kent, and the like. Their "modern" style of landscape gardening was all about improving on what nature should have been, rusticating things and making the views look more natural than natural. They were deeply interested in the idea of the genius loci, or spirit of the place: a location's distinctive atmosphere, the thing that makes it wholly itself. They worked with the way the landscape was already shaped, sometimes introducing new elements or rerouting streams into man-made lakes, all with an eye to emphasizing what was already there. Trees were planted in apparently random, asthetic clumps. Distant fields of sheep were incorporated seamlessly into the foreground by use of Ha-has (I love those to death). This style was the beginning of what came to be an obsession with the Picturesque, meaning, "like a painting."

A ha-ha from below...and above

In its original context, genius loci was the Roman term for the literal protective spirit of a place, this being a common enough conception: think of the roadside shrines in Japan and Bali, India and, long ago, in pre-Christian Europe and Britain. Small statues stand in particular places where people pass through, and as travelers come and partake of the spring or the resting-place, they leave offerings, or simply ask for the blessing of the little god. As time went on, this idea of local gods was no longer considered important. Formal gardens, with geometric layouts and little hedges, became the mode; the genius loci was relegated to a few classical statues placed at discreet intervals or in niches; the concept was lost. However, with the Enlightenment's interest in classical asthetics the term came around again, in the form of an allegory or a metaphor.

The poet Alexander Pope wrote, at around this time:

"Consult the genius of the place in all;
That tells the waters or to rise, or fall;
Or helps th' ambitious hill the heav'ns to scale,
Or scoops in circling theatres the vale;
Calls in the country, catches opening glades,
Joins willing woods, and varies shades from shades,
Now breaks, or now directs, th' intending lines;
Paints as you plant, and, as you work, designs.


After Capability Brown died, his naturalistic style was replaced by the Romantic version of the same thing: gothick ruins, hermitages, and ivy-covered grottos were all the rage. Brown's flexible and mild-mannered genius loci was transformed, via a veritable injection of anxiety, into a more exciting (if faux) Spirit which offered a "sublime thrill" to explorers of the dark and wild gardens of the new era.

For a really brilliant sideline to this, I recommend Tom Stoppard's Arcadia, one of the best plays I have ever seen or read. If you like the things I have been discussing in this blog, you would love this play, all about mathematics, love, chaos theory, Byron, history, death and, of course, landscape design. Mr. Stoppard evokes beautifully the lady of the house's distress at plans to remake her beloved Brownian grounds into something in the Romantic mold, with a ruined tower and creepers.



Another form of landscape arrangement, Feng shui at its base is a form of place-spirit analysis, simplistically speaking, with elements of geomagnetism, astronomy, cardinal direction, and geographical formation working to align human dwellings to the Universe. The ancient Chinese managed, with a minimum of fuss, to deconstruct a somewhat theological concept down to a science of energy flow and geological meaning. Curiously, some of the principles of Feng Shui can be found in many of Brown's gardens.


But to get back to this idea that there are little gods, presences that occupy a place, that give it its character: it is my deep and abiding feeling that perhaps many modern places feel soulless is because they ARE soulless. Think of shopping malls, where the entire landscape has been mashed into shape, flattened into generic-ness.


Think of those bad parts of town: do they have landmarks? Trees, large stones, hills? For the most part, and I dare you to come up with examples otherwise, ghettos and slums are in the flat parts of town. They're the most paved parts. They have the fewest, or the smallest, trees. How about those projects, where the poor are crammed into faceless apartment blocks, with weedy, untended, unused yards? The landscape has lost its face; the genius loci has fled, taking its protection with it.

Okay, I'm being political here, but it's not impossible to fix. Look at this wonderful piece of "intervention", or public performance (?) art, by a group called Rebar. The piece is called Park(ing). Rebar claims it is "Providing temporary public open space in a privatized part of town."




After Rebar did this first piece, other people PARK(ed) in cities all over the world. It's one of the coolest ideas I've seen for combatting urban depression. A portable genius loci!

In concept, I think genius loci can be a lot like mana, as I discussed in a previous post: the more a place is used, polished, loved, allowed to be itself, the more it will create itself, allow itself to grow a soul.

And these souls, these spirits can be very, very small, the genius loci of a waterfall or a knoll or even simply a hidden, sweet corner of an alley (under the fire escape, behind those potted plants). Some, of course, are vast, like the ones at Yosemite Valley, where staff work tirelessly keeping the local genii locii (?) from getting trampled.

In the valley where I live, there is a grave, quite old and all alone, tucked into the corner of a side-valley. Whoever it is who died and was buried there is now a small spirit of that place. People who don't know her, riding past on their horses, leave small handfuls of dried grasses and other things, to thank her for being in that place, making it special. Then there's the huge oak tree on a knoll, high above the valley, all alone, with a trunk the width of a king-sized bed. It stands, shading the mushrooms and irises who grow there, and its massive limbs house some kind of spirit, I am certain - though some long-ago fool carved the word "SUE" into the bark, thus naming the poor spirit for generations to come.

In any case, I think the current craze for small fountains and hidden benches in tiny urban gardens is an attempt, albeit unconscious, by the residents to invite, gently and hesitantly, some sprite or minor god to come and settle, to sit and stay awhile. You build a fountain to delight their ears, put in some fragrant roses in brilliant colors; like hummingbirds, fleet and delicate, they'll come to smell, to listen, to look at the lovely lines and shades you've made with your planting choices. In the end, if you're lucky, you'll make the place comfortable enough and beautiful enough that one of those vanquished spirits might, with a little coaxing, consent to stay.

They need us as much as we need them.